Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology

by Camilla Power (Editor), Morna Finnegan (Editor), Hilary Callan (Editor)

Overview

Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785334269
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	12/01/2016
Series:	Methodology & History in Anthropology , #30
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Camilla Power is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. Her research has focused on the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture, language, art and religion.

Morna Finnegan is an independent researcher who has published on the sexual egalitarianism of Central African hunter-gatherers, with a particular focus on the relationship between ritual and political domains.

Hilary Callan is Director Emerita of the Royal Anthropological Institute, having served as Director from 2000 to 2010. She has held various academic positions in anthropology and international education.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction Camilla Power Morna Finnegan Hilary Callan 1

Chapter 1 Forty Years On: Biosocial Anthropology Revisited Hilary Callan 35

Chapter 2 Rethinking the Relationship between Studies of Ethnobiological Knowledge and the Evolution of Human Cultural Cognition Roy Ellen 59

Chapter 3 Towards a Theory of Everything Chris Knight Jerome Lewis 84

Chapter 4 Sexual Insult and Female Militancy Shirley G. Ardener 103

Chapter 5 Who Sees the Elephant? Sexual Egalitarianism in Social Anthropology's Room Morna Finnegan 130

Chapter 6 From Metaphor to Symbols and Grammar: The Cumulative Cultural Evolution of Language Andrew D.M. Smith Stefan Hoefler 153

Chapter 7 Reconstructing a Source Cosmology for African Hunter-gatherers Camilla Power 180

Chapter 8 Sounds in the Night: Ritual Bells, Therianthropes and Eland Relations among the Hadza Thea Skaanes 204

Chapter 9 Human Physiology, San Shamanic Healing and the 'Cognitive Revolution' Chris Low 224

Chapter 10 Rain Serpents in Northern Australia and Southern Africa: a Common Ancestry? Jan Watts 248

Chapter 11 Bedouin Matrilineatity Revisited Suzanne E. Joseph 272

Chapter 12 'From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain'. An Open Invitation for Social Anthropology to Join the Evolutionary Debate Wendy James 293

Afterword Alan Barnard 319

Index 337

Editorial Reviews

"As a biological anthropologist, I welcomed the opportunity to read this book, and found it to be thoughtful and relevant to my work and interests. I will certainly encourage my colleagues to read it." - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

"...makes a substantial contribution to what Alan Barnard in his afterword refers to as 'a new configuration of anthropological ideas, ' a 'larger' and more comprehensive anthropology. The volume's two major goals are to reengage social anthropology with research on human origins and, in so doing, to apply insights from sociocultural studies to evolutionary interpretations of symbolic culture, sociality, and cultural variation." - Choice

"This work provides an important link between social anthropology and evolutionary anthropology, developing a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding human origins." - Dimitri Bondarenko, The Russian Academy of Sciences

From the Publisher